


I'm not.

by Lynniethebeegirl



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Death, F/F, Pain, Suicide, ellany
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-24 05:42:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4907590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynniethebeegirl/pseuds/Lynniethebeegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny Lawrence's life story. Giant suicide trigger warning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Again, giant trigger warning.

The Lawrences have a death wish.

Danny’s father kills himself at the age of thirty, the same age his father was. Danny and her mother come home from the grocery store to find him lying on the floor in the living room, a small hole in one side of his head, and a much larger one on the other side. It’s the same patch of floor Danny finds her mother on, five years later, needle next to her, overdose stopping her heart.

No Lawrence has ever lived past the age of forty. It’s commonly accepted fact, and when Danny repeats the motions she’d seen her mother take after her father’s death, the nine-one-one call, the person on the other line says “Lawrence, of course, we’ll be right over”. And as she watches them load up the body, she knows that this is not the first Lawrence the ambulance driver has driven to the morgue. 

She doesn’t resent them. They took their lives. They were their lives to take. In a will scribbled on a piece of notebook paper they’ve left everything to her aunt, her father’s younger, and only surviving, sibling. This includes her.

Age fifteen, she leaves the house for the last time. The house her parents had lived in, the house her parents had died in. She feels nothing, the Lawrence’s have lived and died in many houses. This one is no different. 

Her high school years pass slowly, a too bright haze of classes, parties, drunken kisses in the beds of pickup trucks. Her aunt works odd hours at an automotive repair shop, leaving Danny to her own devices. The only interference is the meddling neighbor that occasionally hauls her off to mass, intending to give Danny some spirituality. After a few painful sermons condemning those who have committed suicide, those who are homosexuals, those who are women, Danny gives up and lets herself fall into the haze of standing up, sitting down, moving her mouth to sing hymns. She floats behind the neighbor, nodding politely, but not remembering a single face. 

Her grades are good, the Lawrence’s may be on a one track train to an early death, but they aren’t dumb. She enjoys the tales of princes and princesses, but can’t see herself in any of the girls. Their parents die, they go through hell, and they always have a happy ending. Danny has never seen a happy ending in her future. She’s made her peace with it, and instead imagines herself as a prince or a knight, riding in to save a girl that she might be able to save, to give a second chance at a happy ending.

No girl that could ever love Danny Lawrence will have a happy ending. The wives of the Lawrence men have always followed the Lawrence path, a bullet to the head, an overdose, a car crash that could be passed off as accidental except everyone knew better, knew what the name Lawrence meant. The wife of a Lawrence woman would likely fare no better.

She loves though, she falls in love with people on the street, in her classes, people driving by her apartment complex. She falls in love at the drop of a hat, and she loves every girl she kisses, even if she never sees them again. She falls in love with the sunset, with the autumn air, with everything that cannot last.

She’s in love with Elle, and when one night, late, a candle falls in Elle’s trailer, Danny drags everyone in the trailer out, lying them gently on the grass. She loves every single one of them, but not enough to stay.

Wandering through the flaming trailer she knows that they’ll know when they find the body, that with another name she might be just another party girl that got lost in a fire, but that they’ll know. She hears the roof creak as it begins to fall, and she closes her eyes, her salvation not in that church or in the Bible, but in her last act, saving Elle, carrying her away from this inferno that was sent to consume her. 

She wakes in a hospital, burns on her hands and shoulders, a broken collarbone, but alive. The news hails her as a hero, and an online video goes viral, looking for help with her medical bills, reaching out to people that have never heard the Lawrence name, and don’t know that this was not an accomplishment but a failure.

A University thousands of miles away rears its head, Silas U, in Austria. They’ve been known to give substantial scholarships to students with no family, and they offer Danny a full ride. She accepts on impulse, a tired, hazy impulse, but an impulse no less. Austria is a world away from her home, and she knows that even with the Lawrence family name, she might as well go. No one here needs her, and no one there needs her, but they seem to want her, so she accepts.

She leaves her hometown on a day in late August, leaves just tinged with the smallest hint of gold. Elle kisses her at the bus stop, making her promise to write. Danny smiles, and tells her that she loves her, because she does, even if loving her means never seeing her again.


	2. Chapter 2

Danny falls in love with the roads to the train station, the train tracks, the tunnels the train passes through. She falls in love with the tiny villages the train passes through, with the river it runs alongside. She falls in love with the shiny silver plane, the flight attendants, the clouds the plane flies through. 

She falls in love with Austria, with the rattling bus that takes her to the University, the quaint villages, the mountains. She falls in love with Silas at the first sight of the stone walls.

She chooses literature as her major, the stories of the knights and princesses coming to life. She falls in love with the sky, with the tiny dorm room, with her TA, with the women practicing archery on the lawn.

Her second year she falls in love with Summer Society, with the sisters, with the night hunts and the flickering bonfires. She loves her teachers, her friends, everything.

Her third year she ‘returns’ to class, after spending a summer helping a professor categorize the subbasement, a process involving much more blood and viscera than she expects. She has a TA position with the same professor, and has risen in the Summer Society to be a student leader, helping the younger girls adjust to the new surroundings.

Her second week the unthinkable happens, one of her sisters disappears. One of the younger ones, a sophomore, one that Danny doesn’t know well. Her heart breaks, she’s always been so comfortable with her own death, but another girl, a girl that’s not a Lawrence, that has her whole life in front of her, she could be dead.

At a town hall meeting, the student body being chewed out for some strange internet infraction, Danny sees a small girl sitting a row in front of her, hands twisted in her lap. She glances away quickly, and when she realizes that the dean has no interest in discussing the missing girl, Danny stands up, challenging the dean. She’s not scared of being kicked out. She’s going to find her missing sister.

Unfortunately her request for help ends up piled under the loud shouts of one of the fraternities, insisting on safety patrols, but nothing that will help find the missing girl. The meeting quickly dissolves into chaos, salted herring thrown into the crowd, and her separated from her sisters, the only face she can remotely recognize is the small girl she’d noticed earlier.

Her name is Laura, and Danny falls in love with her immediately. She’s tiny but strong, brave, smart, and she shines with a light brighter than anything Danny’s ever seen, brighter than the fire that she tried to let consume her. They quickly set to work trying to find the missing girls, all girls on similar scholarships to Danny, all missing.

And when things go down, when Lafontaine is taken, when Laura’s vampire roommate turns out to be useful after all, Danny still loves. She loves Laura, she loves Laf and Perry, she even loves Carmilla. It’s a hollow love, too little too late, but she sees the void in Carmilla’s eyes, and knows that the eternity she is faced with is as painful as the short years that Danny will live. But they’ve both accepted this, and trudge on, Danny with her dark finish line, Carmilla with her winding path.

She finds Carmilla there, in the pit, and carries her back to Laura. Hoping that she still has a chance. She does, and Danny falls in love with the hesitant looks Laura and Carmilla give each other. Perry rushes her out the door, and Danny falls in love with the way Perry checks the gash on her nose before fussing over Laf, recently saved from the pit.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a rape warning on this one, necrophilia and stuff.

When half the campus implodes, Danny stays, standing at the edge of the pit, wondering what would happen if she died here and now.

But she lives, and she bandages wounds and burns the bodies of the dead Summer’s, and even though every breath she takes is more painful than the last, she keeps breathing.

Mail still trickles in, somehow, and on Christmas she gets a letter. Her aunt has died in a car accident, swerving into a tree on a straight country road. Danny lights a small pyre to burn the letter. She’s glad that Laura has fallen for someone else. Loving Danny Lawrence is a death sentence for any girl.

When Laura comes back she goes back to making the videos, and Danny helps her, writing reports, filming, whatever Laura needs. When Laura and Carmilla break up she holds Laura while she cries, knowing that Laura has a long time on this earth, and Carmilla has longer, and they have so much room for second chances, so much more than Danny will ever have.

One night, on a mission for Laura, eight of the remaining sisters agree to help Danny, but when she gets to the grove where they’ve agreed to meet her, she finds them lying there, bloody holes where their throats should be.

Danny falls to her knees, pain doubling her over. Eight of them. Eight. She opens her mouth in a voiceless scream, scrabbling for their hands, but recoiling when she feels how cold they are. They had been so warm, so vibrant. And someone had taken them from this world, this world that they should have had so much more time in.

Blindly she stumbles to the first place she can think of, Vordenburg’s office. The only person she can think of that could have done this is Mattie, and pain blinds her, obliterating everything but this task. If Mattie hurts someone else that Danny loves…

And when Mattie grabs her, Danny does the unthinkable. She grabs the locket and smashes it, and she feels the pain ebb into something so much more terrifying. She has saved herself. Danny Lawrence has done something to prevent her death. 

She sees the pain on Carmilla’s face. Three hundred years. She can’t imagine, can’t even begin to comprehend. The longest anyone has ever given her was fifteen years, the last five drowned in alcohol and heroin. Three hundred years.

She feels her heart break when Carmilla grabs Laura, tries not to vomit when Laura screams in pain.

She should have died.

She should have died.

She should have died.

And she keeps living, barricading doors when Vordenburg’s army came, trying to take away some of the guilt Laura has placed on herself. Because this is Danny’s fault.  
She should have died.

She brings Mattie’s body down to the basement, to a dark antechamber. It’s the only place Danny can be sure Vordenburg’s army won’t find. If they found Mattie they would desecrate her body, something awful, unthinkable. After Carmilla had left, Danny had dredged up some videos of her and Mattie, and had heard Mattie bring up Carmilla’s encounter with the Vordenburgs. 

Danny wishes she could give Mattie a funeral pyre, but this is all she can do, slide a section of wall over her tomb to protect her from the same horror that Vordenburg had inflicted on Carmilla.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Probably one more chapter after this.

Someone needs to go down to the catacombs, someone needs to rally the troops. Danny agrees to the plan without a second thought. It’s a suicide mission, or might be, or it could be heroic. Danny isn’t sure which one she is more scared to be.

“I’m ready to suffer and die, as long as it’s for the right reason. The right person.” Danny isn’t sure if she can believe in the first part. She believes in the second part, and that makes it so much more terrifying. She’ll never see Laura again.

She stands, trying not to cry, and Kirsch escorts her out. He thinks he loves her. She thinks she loves Laura. Death has already fallen deeply in love with both of them.

“Keep her safe.” Danny hesitates in the gateway to the caverns, wishing desperately for human contact. A hug, a handshake, something. But those are in the realm of the living, and she’s never been a part of that.

She does it, all of it, she leads them out, across the field. And she fights, fighting with no regard for her own life, fighting only to protect her friends. As the dead begin to rise, rotting flesh and shambling feet, she wonders if she’ll be one of them. If she already is one of them.

In the fighting she remembers a letter she’d gotten years ago, just after she’d joined the Summer Society. Elle is dead, some sort of party mishap, drugs, alcohol. She had been dead before the ambulance got there. She hadn’t suffered.

Maybe loving the Lawrences isn’t what drives women to their deaths. Maybe the Lawrences are drawn to them because their deaths are written on them in the same way. 

They stand on a wall, and then Kirsch falls against her, screaming in pain. She helps him up, hauls him back to the Dean’s place, dumping him on the couch.

He is so full of life that it terrifies her. He is life, and thinks he loves death. But she doesn’t love him. But she thinks she loves Laura, and that is worse.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is it, guys! Comment if you liked it!

When the knife slips between her ribs, tearing through internal organs, she doesn’t cry. She stumbles, locking eyes with Laura before falling to her hands and knees.

Laura lifts Danny, cradling her shoulders. The contact is comforting, warm, living. The Lawrences have always died alone. That was the only thing that had ever scared Danny. Being alone. 

“Danny, no, no, Danny!” Laura’s tears drip onto her, and small hands try to stop the bleeding, stopping when it’s clear there’s no going back. The blood is in her lungs, every breath bubbles in her chest, feeling like fire. 

“I’m not scared.” Danny whispers, staring into Laura’s face. Laura is terrified, hands shaking, tears on her face. 

“I’m not scared.” Each breath is slow, painful, the pressure in her chest increasing. She’s leaving Laura here alone, unprotected. Carmilla will protect her, or one of her other friends. They all love Laura too much, too much to leave. Danny feels something shift inside of her, more blood flowing into her lungs. She thinks she loves her, but she’s leaving her. Death’s love is eternal. 

“I’m not scared.” An icy numbness seeps across her body. She tries to stave it off, but she’s used up all the love in her heart, lost it on Elle, on Laura, on Carmilla, on this world. Maybe this was why the Lawrences died so quickly. They left love on street corners, on strangers, running down rivers and shining in sunsets. They scattered it everywhere, bleeding themselves dry.

Danny is empty, dry, used up. She doesn’t feel regret, or joy, or fear. Just love now, but love from Laura, from Elle, from her sisters. It wraps around her, warming her, comforting her as the last bit of strength leaves her. 

“I’m not.”


End file.
